I was going to Korea: I like Simon Winchester. So of course I was attracted to reading this book which was originally published in 1988, and has been recently republished in its second edition. However, there is little evidence that the book has been re-edited in any way, and so it was a very dated travel description of South Korea by an English writer, who spoke minimal Korean, and who reflected the sexism and anti-Americanism of the time.
The premise of the book is that Winchester decided to follow the path of Hendrick Hamel, the Dutch soldier who was shipwrecked on Jeju Island in 1653 on his way to Japan. He was prevented from leaving by the isolationist policies of the Josean emperor, and spent 13 years in what is now Korea, before escaping back to the Netherlands and writing the first western account of Korea. Winchester followed Hamel’s route up into what is now North Korea, but he could not cross the Demilitarized Zone at that time (even though, as he tells us in the preface to the second edition, he did manage to visit later). His route takes him up from Jeju Island to the central and western side of South Korea, where he meets mainly with monks and US servicemen, as well as some ‘ordinary’ South Koreans.
I found the book very dated in its outlook, and I felt uncomfortable about his pontifications on South Korean life and national characteristics from such an Anglo-centric perspectives. Although I am usually a magpie for interesting details, especially when I am travelling in a country that I have read about, I didn’t really gain much from the book to bore my fellow-travellers with (“Hey, did you know that…..”)
I have been travelling overseas with family, and so I didn’t have many opportunities to listen to podcasts, and those that I did listen to were mainly on current affairs (e.g. The Rest is Politics UK and US) and so not really worth recording.
The Rest is History The Road to 1066. One of the few books that I had bought for me as a child was a poetry book about 1066 which I think must have been 1066 and All That. I can’t for the life of me work out why I wanted that book, or how I even knew about it. Nonetheless, I have always been aware of that 1066 was an important date. This 4 part series is right down Tom Holland’s alley, as he wrote the book Millenium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom which looks at the turn of the first millenium, and he takes the running in these podcasts. Taking from ‘The Rest is History’ page (largely because I have lost my own notes), Episode 548: The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)The Norman Conquest of 1066, culminating in the legendary Battle of Hastings, is perhaps the greatest turning point in the history of the English nation. It was a year that changed the fate of England forever, forging empires, and settling continents. And yet, despite its infamy and significance, the true nature of those totemic events are often forgotten. So what happened in the build up to the Battle of Hastings? The dramas of 1066 were set in motion by a succession crisis in 975 AD, following the death of King Edgar. England by that time was the wealthiest and best run government in Northern Europe, a kingdom of united English speaking peoples, established by Alfred the Great and his successors. Following the mysterious death of Edgar’s first son, Edward, his second son, Æthelred – later known as ‘The Unready’ – took the throne. For many years his kingdom flourished, until disaster struck: the Vikings returned to reign terror upon the Anglo-Saxon people, under the leadership of the terrifying Olaf Tryggvason, King of Norway. With his coffers straining, his people enslaved, and his lands shrinking, Æthelred, now wed to the foreign Emma of Normandy, finally decided to take drastic action, and weed the Vikings out once and for all. So it was that with the dawning of the millennium, a terrible, bloody massacre began….
And then in Episode 549: The Road to 1066 The Revenge of the Vikings Pt 2 Following the bloody St Brice’s Day Massacre, of the 13th of November 1002, which saw King Æthelred brutally exterminating the Danes from England, the Vikings were hungry for revenge. None more so than the terrifying Scandinavian King, Sweyn Forkbeard. Having capitalised on his famous father, Harold Bluetooth’s unification of Norway and Denmark, through his aggressive christianisation of the formerly pagan peoples there, Sweyn had built up a formidable force. It was this power that Æthelred had unwisely taunted, underestimating the might of the Danes. He would pay the price only a few short months later when Sweyn’s terrible fleet landed at Wilton Abbey in Wessex – one of the greatest symbols of the House of Alfred the Great – to bleed England dry, and destroy her King. Time and time again, from this date onwards, Sweyn’s Danish raids would devastate England, even going so far as to lock the Archbishop of Canterbury in a cage…by 1013 Æthelred’s reign was essentially over, his family having fled to Normandy, and England under Danish rule. But then, the death of Sweyn Forkbeard would change everything, setting in motion another titanic war of succession, this time pitting the Scandinavian Cnut against Æthelred’s son Edmund Ironside.
“Pepe” Mujica Cordano was a Uruguayan politician, revolutionary and farmer who served as the 40th president of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. He died on 13 May 2025. He was imprisoned for 14 years and tortured as a member of the Tupamaros guerillas, and on his release he threw himself into politics. The times suited him: there were a number of left-wing Latin American governments at the time, and the economic situation was good for Uruguay. He never took a salary while he was President, and tootled around in his little blue Volkswagon, continuing to live in his very humble house. After his Presidency, he remained much as he had been while President, giving wide-ranging and wise interviews to journalists.
Today, the United States has a grifter and braggart as President. You could not find a more stark contrast than Pepe Mujica.
At our Unitarian Universalist fellowship, I usually volunteer to take the March service because March is Women’s History Month here in Australia, and I like to look at the stories of significant women and groups- some Unitarian, others not- who have grappled with living our their commitment to social justice and yearning for spirituality. Over the years I’ve looked at Martha Turner, Catherine Helen Spence, Mary Montgomerie Bennett, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and this year I decided I’d look at the Peabody Sisters- three Unitarian women born in New England during the first decade of the 19th century.
I had vague memories of visiting the Peabody Museum in Salem (same family, different branch) and other than that I knew nothing about them. I’d heard them mentioned in passing in a course on Unitarian Theology (yes, there is such a thing), and a reference to the book by Megan Marshall, so I chose them as my Women’s History theme for the month.
Marshall’s book The Peabody Sisters starts and finishes with a wedding. It starts with Sophia Peabody’s wedding to the author Nathaniel Hawthorne on July 9 1842, and it ends with her sister Mary Peabody’s wedding to the politician and education reformer Horace Mann on May 1 the following year. All three sisters were to live to beyond middle age (indeed, Elizabeth the eldest was to live to the age of ninety) but Marshall has chosen to end her book here. Perhaps it’s because a married woman’s life was so easily obscured by her husband’s, especially if he was prominent in political or literary affairs, as was the case here. Perhaps there was a drying up of the source material at this point, or perhaps Marshall’s interest was more in the sisters as a unit: she doesn’t make it clear.
The three girls had three brothers, but the brothers seem to have been a rather lacklustre group, perhaps because of the tepid example of their father, Nathaniel Peabody, who struggled to make a living as a doctor, dentist and later, farmer. The girls, on the other hand, were spurred by their mother Eliza, to become teachers or to earn their living in some way. Their mother Eliza conducted a boarding school in their home for the daughters of the local town, and was herself a creative and progressive teacher in her own right. The family was on a downwardly mobile trajectory, but Eliza herself had memories of her grandfather’s house at Friendship Hall and the library that was available to her to educate herself. The strong matriarchal influence in the household dynamics put Eliza’s daughters in good stead.
The eldest was Elizabeth, born in 1804, a brilliant linguist, teacher and conversationalist. Her mother came from a Unitarian background, but the young Elizabeth was transfixed by Unitarian luminary William Ellery Channing, known as the ‘Father of Unitarianism’ who preached at her church when Elizabeth was about 8 years old. She threw herself into Unitarian literature and a wide range of reading with such enthusiasm that one summer she was banned from reading anything but the Bible, which she did, reading the New Testament thirty times over a summer, each reading directed towards a different aspect of doctrine. She developed a close friendship with Channing, and as the group that came to be known as the ‘Transcendentalists’ forged links with, and then sometimes broke away from, Unitarianism, she and her sisters were brought into the heart of intellectual life in Boston. She learned ten languages, and through her translations of European texts, she introduced men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau and others to Continental and Romantic thought that fed into Transcendentalism. She was loud, gregarious and talkative, but heedless to her personal appearance and dress, much to the chagrin of her mother.
She was a strong sibling to contend with, but her youngest sister Sophia (with emphasis on the ‘i’ when pronouncing her name) was a strong personality too. She did not compete directly with Elizabeth, but instead took to her bed, prostrated by headaches, and the family came to a silent halt so as to not distress her further. She warned her sisters to have no expectations of her, and they didn’t, thus relieving her of the need to financially contribute to the family on a regular basis. Eventually her family, fearing for her life, turned to William Ellery Channing’s physician brother Dr Walter Channing. His interests were in women’s health, and particularly the ‘bed case’ of young women whose poor health confined them to their bedroom. He was skeptical that there was any physical sickness. He was more critical of the medical establishment for letting young girls like Sophia linger in bed for decades, and less critical of Sophia the patient. It was interesting watching Marshall negotiate this issue of female illness and its relationship with emotional and power relationships. She notes that neurologist Oliver Sacks, who wrote at length on migraines, also suggested an emotional bind that is set up in the ‘situational migraine’. As seemed to occur repeatedly with the sisters, once Sophia had the handsome Dr Walter Channing as her confidante, she became infatuated with him, and later infuriated with him when she sensed that he was judging her.
In between these two strong forces was Mary Peabody, the quintessential middle sister. She was said to be the most beautiful of the sisters, but the remaining photograph of her doesn’t show her in a particularly flattering light. She was often swept along in Elizabeth’s plans to re-establish her school in different towns after the school had failed to make money through economic downturns or as the result of scandalous gossip. Elizabeth took up all the oxygen in the room, and although she may have been interested in the conversation, Mary had no wish to be in the centre of it. However, when she was called upon to accompany her sister Sophia to Cuba in the hope that the climate would improve Sophia’s health, her social conscience was assailed by the sight of enslaved people working on the plantation, sparking her interest in social justice.
The relationship between the sisters was at its most fraught and tense when potential partners came onto the scene. Elizabeth competed with both her sisters over men that they had fallen in love with, although she channelled this into a more ‘sisterly’ vein once their sisters had landed their catches. That said, I wouldn’t trust Elizabeth at all.
She threw herself into the intellectual milieu surrounding the Transcendentalists, becoming a writer in her own right (although the little bit of her work that I read was turgid and indigestable) and editing the sermons of William Ellery Channing and writing up Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lectures. She was involved as a teacher in Bronson Alcott’s Temple School, and wrote a book that publicized it, although they fell out over it later. She is credited with the establishment of kindergarten education in America. In 1840 she opened a bookshop in Boston- the first woman to do so. It was bookstore, a lending library, and a place for scholars, liberal thinkers, and transcendentalists to meet. It stocked transcendentalist material and foreign books and shipped books to interested readers. Margaret Fuller began holding ‘conversations’ there in her discussion group comprising both men and women. Elizabeth recorded those too. She began publishing in her own right as well, and became the publisher of ‘The Dial’, the journal of the Transcendental Club.
Group biographies can be difficult, especially family group biographies where one family member may be perceived to overshadow the others. Elizabeth is best remembered by history, but Marshall has worked very hard to provide a family context and bring forward the achievements of the other Peabody sisters beyond marrying prominent men. The book was well received, earning Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir. Marshall paints a vibrant picture of intellectually engaged, active women who, although not as well known as the men with whom they socialized, were contributors to Transcendentalism, and American society more generally, at a time when women’s roles were becoming increasingly circumscribed.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Kobo e-book via subscription
Read because: I gave a presentation at my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship to celebrate Women’s History Month.
This movie was available on the plane on my recent trip, but I wanted to save it for the cinema, when I would have people to talk to about it afterwards. I’m glad I did. When I read the book, I wondered how a novella of such interiority could be depicted on the screen. The answer is simply Cillian Murphy, who is absolutely brilliant. As is Emily Watson, who plays the Mother Superior, with such menace below her icy exterior. The film depicted his anguish more as a breakdown than in the book, but I guess that film, by its nature, encourages visual representation of inner pain rather than internal dialogue, as occurs in a book. The sound was very well done too, although to be honest I could barely understand a word they said and found myself craving subtitles (I think I have been spoiled by subtitles). But in terms of reflecting his inner torment, and the stultifying presence of the Church, the sound was excellent. As with The Quiet Girl, it was a movie that had so many levels, and such poignancy, with an ending left ambiguous and yet satisfying at the same time.
There’s a particular frisson of delight when you’re reading a novel set in your own town. You recognize the streets and you have a mental landscape painting of the setting, even if it is set 160 years earlier. Jane Sullivan, herself now a Melbourne resident after emigrating from England decades ago, takes us to post-Gold Rush Melbourne, and in a way not unlike Kerry Greenwood with her Phrynne Fisher novels, introduces us to a feisty, intelligent amateur detective who is less sidekick and more spur to her co-investigator Magnus Scott, a journalist who styles himself as ‘The Walking Gentleman’.
The novel starts in a bedroom, as a doctor tries to revive a beautiful young actress Marie St Denis from what appears to be, and is later characterized as, an accidental laudanum overdose. Her closest friend, aspiring actress Lola Sanchez, is not satisfied by such a neat explanation, and she enlists the help of journalist Magnus Scott, one of the few people who wrote a sympathetic obituary for Miss Dennis, to investigate. Fired up by the techniques and success of the detectives in the penny-dreadful crime literature she enjoys, Lola undertakes some amateur sleuthing to uncover multiple footprints in Miss Dennis’ room- but to whom do they belong? Lola devises a list of possible suspects, many of whom belong to the highest echelons of Melbourne society, and disguising herself as a young boy, breaks into houses and sneaks around bedrooms looking for clues. In the meantime, Magnus himself is on a rollercoaster of financial events, and it seems that indeed, there are shadowy forces at work, who may or may not be the same men that Lola is suspecting.
I was thinking about 19th and early 20th century crime fiction, and its reliance on plot, coincidence and red herrings, especially compared with the detective stories of the 21st century and their emphasis on the character and motivations of the detective, just as much as of the perpetrator. This book is truly in the former category, complete with cliff-hangers and diversions that at times strain credulity.
For the historian of Melbourne, it is gratifying to see that Sullivan has done her research, and acknowledges the assistance and friendship of writers like Lucy Sussex, whose recent Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-writer, and Her Criminal Son George is dealing with a similar time-span and genre. I found myself thinking of Barbara Minchinton’s work on Madame Brussells and The Women of Little Lon, although these both look at a later date. A couple of times I found myself raising a sceptical eyebrow, only to find that Sullivan was right: cold cream in 1868? ( Yes, and before then too), the Menzies Hotel? (Yes, opened in 1867) and so, yes, Sullivan has done her work.
I enjoyed Sullivan’s playful tweaking of real-life characters in creating her own Lola Sanchez and Magnus Scott. The name Lola Sanchez of course evokes the Gold-Rush performer Lola Montez, and Magnus Scott as ‘The Wandering Gentleman’ and editor of the New Bohemian bears more than a passing resemblance to Marcus Clarke. She integrates historical figures as well, most notably the enigmatic Redmond Barry, patriarch of Melbourne’s cultural scene but with his own domestic ambiguities, and Dr Nield, the coroner. She takes us to Redmond Barry’s house in Rathdowne St Carlton that later became integrated into the Royal Childrens Hospital, the Theatre Royal, Chinatown and the eponymous Punch Lane, running between the current-day Exhibition and Spring Streets. And as Sullivan explained in a talk that she gave to the Ivanhoe Reading Circle in April, there was indeed an actress Marie St Denis who died of laudanum poisoning, and the story sprang from historical events, with equally heavy doses of research and imagination.
I wonder if this is the first in a series? There’s scope, and plenty of other Melbourne murders to explore…
The Ezra Klein Show. I’m over in Phnom Penh surrounded with little ones at the moment, and it seemed a particularly apposite time to listen to Ezra Klein’s interview with Jonathan Haidt Our Kids Are the Least Flouishing Generation We Know Of. Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was on the best seller list for a year. Haidt’s work has been picked up by many on the right, although it really transcends a left/right binary, and it’s interesting that he often references the certainties (for good or bad) promulgated by traditional religions. I don’t know if it’s my age, or my affiliation with Unitarian Universalism, but I find much to agree with here.
The Rest is History Episode 538 Horror in the Congo– 3 parts. I had already read Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost which Tom and Dominic defer to in these episodes, and so I was already familiar with quite a bit of material. However, listening to it at more than 20 years remove, it seems even more relevant today with Trump’s naked shake-down of compromised countries for their rare earths (somehow, everything I read seems to come back to Trump). I had forgotten the degree of privatization and the sheer exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold, and the role of Roger Casement in publicizing the atrocities. The first three episodes deal with the story of the Congo, while Episode 541 Part 4 Fear and Loathing in the Congo looks in detail at Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness which I read over fifty years ago. I remember the feeling of impending doom in it, but I didn’t particularly see it as the masterpiece that Tom and Dominic do. Of course, it was written in 1898, and new literary and historical lenses are trained on it now, with some commentators seeing as racist and imperialistic.
In the Shadows of Utopia. I’m in Cambodia, but Episode 4 of Season Two deals completely with Vietnam. In The Path to the Second Indo-China War Part I The Two Vietnams, Lachlan promises a shorter episode dealing with the years immediately following the Geneva Accords. He starts with the heavily-choreographed photograph of the monk self-immolating in 1963, which most people associate with the Vietnam War, but it was in fact a protest against the actions of the South Vietnamese government before the Vietnam War had even started.
He then moves to examining first North Vietnam, then South Vietnam. Between 1953-1957 the North Vietnamese Government under Ho Chi Minh, following the example of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, embarked upon a land reform program. This involved cleaning out ‘the reactionary and evil landlords’, but perhaps with not quite the same ruthlessness of Russia and China, with the suggestion that perhaps 1 in 1000 people would need to be executed. Although the numbers of victims may have been lower, it followed the same process: denunciation, land confiscation and redistribution, and later collectivization (which, as in Russia and China the newly landed peasants deeply resented). However, there was so much internal protest that the government admitted its error and abandoned the program and turned its attention instead to the writing of a new constitution which would cement the role of the Communist Government.
In South Vietnam, although under the sponsorship and patronage of the United States, the Diem government undertook a very similar program (albeit less violent). The Geneva Accords were undermined from the start, and the planned elections never took place. The nascent-fascist Diem government was elitist and rife with nepotism. There was a similar land reform program, complete with denunciations and arrests for possible disloyalty, and it too was abandoned when it failed. The formation of the National Liberation Front gave a focus to the armed struggle, and many former South Vietnamese with communist sympathies who had fled north returned to South Vietnam and the civil war resumed.
I visited South Korea with my son and his family, so I thought that I’d embark on a bit of South Korean literature before I went. Other than Pachinko, which is partially set in Korea, I don’t believe that I’ve read any other books set in or about Korea.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but My Brilliant Life ended up being a completely different from what I thought it would be. As it turned out, I was reading it in Large Print edition (the only one I could find) which gave it an air of being a rather light, speedy read. It is narrated by sixteen year old Aerum, who is suffering from progeria, a rare inherited disease that causes premature aging. As his body gradually shuts down, he decides to write his family story, drawn together from what his parents have told him about their lives in a rural village, their meeting and early marriage and his childhood. He is a lonely child: he cannot attend school, and has no friends of his own age – for what indeed is his age in a body that is accelerating towards a premature death? The family is not rich, and the hospital bills are mounting up, and so he decides to make a paid appearance on a television show, which alleviates the financial pressure and launches him into a rather voyeuristic celebrity. Following the program, he receives many emails, and he begins corresponding with Seoha, who is suffering from cancer, and in the absence of other age-appropriate relationships, he becomes infatuated with her.
I will not divulge the end of the story. It is sad and inevitable. It’s a book about life, love and presence.
Although this is book was in Large Print format, it could possibly be an interesting Young Adult book- after all, there’s no shortage of books about teenagers dying of incurable diseases. I don’t know that I learned much about South Korea from it, but I did learn about progeria.
We’ve been on holidays for the last two weeks of March, and so most of my listening has been in the car, with another passenger. I mainly indulged my love of current affairs with the UK and US variations of The Rest is Politics, but I did manage to get a couple of other podcasts in.
One was the ABC’s six-part series Conspiracy?: War on the Waterfront which deals with the waterfront dispute between Patrick Stevedores and the Maritime Union of Australia in 1998. I’ve mainly been left with the image of men in balaclavas and attack dogs, and I’d forgotten about the role of the National Farmers Federation and Dubai. It’s quite chilling hearing the familiar voices of John Howard and Peter Reith matter-of-factly telling lies. Interestingly, all sides claim to be winners, except the contract workers brought in to break the strike, even the unions and the waterside workers who, to me, seem to have lost more than they gained.
While we’re on the ABC, it’s worth listening to David Marr’s thoughtful interview with Associate Professor David Slucki from the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University who was part of the working committee that developed the Universities Australia definition of anti-semitism. Yes, there I was shouting to myself as I listened to the podcast, frustrated by Slucki’s inability to define certain activities and attitudes as antisemitic or not, when students’ lives and careers are being held hostage to such judgements.
I was in Tasmania during this period, so it seemed fitting to listen to an episode Convict Mutineers Part 1 from Australian Histories Podcast hosted by the rather giggly non-historian Jenny which is rather a little too Convicts, Gold and Bushrangers for my liking. Nonetheless, she has an interesting episode on William Swallow, a man with a string of aliases who managed to escape imprisonment in Hobart Town to return to England, only to be arrested again and returned to Port Arthur where he plotted yet another escape. It’s part of a two-part series Convict Mutineers, and the second part continues with Swallow’s story.
Just recently I listened to an interview by the New York Times with Curtis Yarvin, who has been name-checked by a lot of Trump’s acolytes. He talks quickly and rather disjointedly, and is fond of throwing out historical references to defend his views and give them the sheen of academe. People are quick to bring out the old saw “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and there’s a danger of cherry-picking when computer engineers (in Yarvin’s case) and social philosophers (in Krznaric’s case) look back to history to bolster a present day argument. But that is unfair to Krznaric: unlike Yarvin, he admits that he is not a historian, and he acknowledges that he is very much standing on their shoulders while surveying present-day society. His book has footnotes, references and an index, and he includes in his footnotes references that make a different argument to the one that he is making. And unlike Yarvin, this is a quiet, considered, optimistic (too optimistic, I fear) book that piques your interest rather than bludgeoning you into silence with names and dates that you have no way of challenging.
Krznaric acknowledges the dangers of cherry-picking but argues that:
All writing of history is selective- requiring choices about topics, time periods, relevant actors, the importance of race and gender, the role of culture and technology, the use of quantitative data and other methodological issues. What matters is being clear about the approach. From the myriad of historical contexts, I have consciously selected events and stories that offer inspiration for tackling the ten major crises facing humanity in the twenty-first century, and actively focus on the collective struggles and initiatives of everyday people, since this is the realm in which we have the greatest potential agency. (p.7)
So what are these ten major crises, and what historical events does he use to discuss them? His opening chapter ‘Breaking the Fossil Fuel Addiction’ draws parallels between the vested interests supporting the continuation of slavery in Britain in the early 19th century, and the fossil fuel interests that are undercutting action on climate change. I’ve though about this connection previously, and the distasteful thought that, as with slavery, it may be necessary to ‘buy out’ fossil fuel interests, in the same way that the compensation for slavery went not to the enslaved, but to their enslavers. As well as emphasizing the importance of creating coalitions across party lines and the potency of the ‘radical flank’ to make the comparatively moderate thinkable, he also notes the place of violence. The Captain Swing civil disobedience led to the 1832 Reform Act, which diluted the power of the slavers and their lobbyists in British Parliament; while the Caribbean slave revolts made continued enslavement unattainable. I think that this chapter was the strongest in the book, and it stands alone well.
Question Two involves the nurturing of tolerance. He starts off with his own family story, with his father arriving in Melbourne from Poland in 1951 as part of Australia’s post-war migration, a story which seems from the distance of 70 years to have been successful but which may not have felt so rose-tinted at the time. He looks back to the Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus, where Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed, although the backlash of the Reconquista is a salutary warning, I think. He looks to the early years of Chinese immigration when, as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds note, Australia led the world in ‘drawing the global colour line’ at the turn of the 20th century (a reference that he should have referenced, but did not). He also looks at Ghana and the post-independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, who came to power in 1957 and embarked on a series of policies and programs to create a unifying Ghanaian national identity. He talks about the importance of city design in nurturing tolerance, looking at Singapore’s public housing which even today has a quota system where each estate must reflect the national percentage of Singapore’s main racial groups.
The third question is that of over-consumption in ‘Kicking the Consumer Habit’ where he turns to the Edo period of Japan between 1603 and 1868, which ran on a circular economy where almost everything was reused, repaired, repurposes or eventually recycled. Rationing during WWII prompted similar behaviour.
Chapter 4 ‘Taming Social Media’ looks back to the printing revolution and the rise of the coffee house culture in Georgian times as examples of disruptive technologies that drove political change. He notes that the development of print formed the ‘typographic brain’ that is linear, sequential and rationalist; and suggests that the digital age could prompt changes in the way we connect ideas and organize information.
Chapter 5 ‘Securing Water for All’ is subtitled ‘Water Wars and the Genius of the Commons’, and it’s an important chapter, warning in its opening sentence that “we are a civilisation heading towards aquacide”. He looks back to China’s Qing dynasty in the mid-18th century where Chen Hongmou, a government official, managed the building of irrigation and drainage systems. He championed the construction of water wheels and ensured regular repair work on ditches, dams and wells (p. 109). But his work could not survive the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the El Nino of 1876-8. He looks to Valencia’s Tribunal of Waters, which meets every Wednesday outside the Cathedral to resolve water conflicts as it has since the fifteenth century. However, water can be used as a tool of war, like the Cochabamba Water War in Bolivia in 2000 which led to civil unrest when the water services were privatized in 1999 under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF. Israel has long used water as a tool against Palestinians in the territories that they occupy, but he looks to initiatives like the Good Water Neighbours Program in the Lower Jordan Valley as cause for hope (although I wonder how it’s holding up now) and the International Commission for the Protections of the Danube River. However, seeing the debacle that our own Murray River scheme in Australia has become, I am not hopeful.
Chapter 6 ‘Reviving Faith in Democracy’ involves rediscovering the communal democracy of the past, and he goes way back to Djenné in West Africa between 250 BCE and 1400 CE, a complex trading centre which at its height was home to 40,000 people. He points out that the modern ideal of representative government was designed to prevent democratic politics, not enable it. He goes back to Athenian democracy and the Rhaetian Free State which emerged between 1524 and 1799 in what is now Switzerland, and even Kurdish confederations and the Rojava Revolution in Syria- although I’m not sure what the status is since the fall of Al-Assad. I see that their jailed revolutionary leader Abdullah Ocalan has declared a ceasefire of the PKK against Turkey- one of the problems with writing a topical book!
‘Managing the Genetic Revolution’ looks back to medieval alchemy, in essence returned as genetic engineering. He sees the genetic revolution as one of the rare turning points in history that fundamentally changes the trajectory of the human journey (p. 153). He turns to the past for warnings, looking first at the Eugenics movement and the Better Babies Contest, and Nazi Germany’s adoption of eugenics as the basis for its race-based state in Germany. Rather more hopefully, he looks at the March of Dimes and the crusade against polio where medical innovation was directed towards the common good. He warns of the ‘enclosure movement’ related to biodata, and the Wild West commercialization of the US biotech sector.
‘Bridging the Inequality Gap’ starts with the Black Death, which brought about such huge economic changes. But as he notes, the idea that substantive reductions in wealth inequality can only be brought about by warfare, state failure and pandemics is depressing and disempowering, because it suggests that all well-intentioned peaceful attempts to tackle inequality are unlikely to change the status quo. He looks to the Indian state of Kerala which was a global pioneer of mass education in the 19th century, with women at the forefront. Its government has alternated between a Communist Party and a Congress Party generally supportive of social democracy. In the Global North, the spotlight usually falls on Scandinavia, and especially Finland, which has also been at the forefront of women’s education and egalitarianism.
Chapter 9 ‘Keeping the Machines Under Control’ looks at the rise of capitalism and the extraordinary capabilities of AI- two phenomena that have deep connections. He looks to financial capitalism with the Dutch East India Company, Scottish financier John Law and his schemes under King Louis XIV of France. He argues that both financial capitalism and AI develop into a vast, complex supersystem, with the risk of contagion where any problem in one area spills over into other areas, especially with fake information, mass technological unemployment, and the potential for military use. The final similarity is that both are non-sentient human creations. He looks to the early distributed ownership models like the co-operative movement and mutual aid societies, although he admits the difficulty of breaking the ownership model of the AI industry- even worse since Trump came to power.
His final chapter ‘Averting Civilizational Breakdown’ ( a rather gloomy title) tells us that we face the Great Simplification, where too many ecological limits have been breached. Will society bend or break? He admits that we are currently facing the break scenario. He reminds us that
No civilization lasts forever: empires and dynasties are born, they flower and then die, sometimes abruptly but usually over decades or centuries. (p. 223)
He suggests that there are three broad features that are likely to give a civilization the ability to adopt and transform over time. The first is asabiya, or the power of collective solidarity, which was described in 1375 by an Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun. We see this in the wake of natural disasters (when every country proclaims that the united action of its citizens reflects that specific nationality and its ‘spirit’). It thrives on competition between states, but the problem is that the ecological emergency does not have an external enemy that we can act in solidarity against. The second is biophilia where we develop a sense of ecological stewardship for the whole web of life (or as the 7th principle of Unitarian Universalism puts it “respect for the interdependent web of all existence”). He looks back to the mass planting that took place after the publication of John Evelyn’s book Sylva in 1664 and the vestiges of pagan traditions of nature worship, as well as indigenous worldviews of intimacy and independence between humankind, the land and the living world (p. 230). The third feature is crisis response, when we think historically about the meaning of ‘crisis’ itself, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s popularization of the idea of a ‘tipping point’. He looks to radical change undertaken during war (e.g. WW2 industralization), in the wake of disasters (the Dutch government response to the floods in 1953), and in the context of revolution (Chinese land reform- not a good example; the Cuban National Literacy Campaign).
Krznaric makes no secret of his politics or his priorities. He has been personally involved in Extinction Rebellion, which he characterizes as the ‘radical flank’ of the environmental movement, and he himself was involved in citizens’ assemblies on Biodiversity Loss, even though he ended up being rather disenchanted with them. He calls for ‘radical hope’ because
Disruptive movements can change the system (e.g. slavery, the women’s movement)
‘We’ can prevail over ‘me’ (e.g. Valencia’s Tribunal of Waters, al-Andalus, soup kitchens in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake)
There are alternatives to capitalism (e.g. Edo Japan, the ‘entrepreneurial state’)
Humans are social innovators
Other futures are possible (classical Athens, the West African city of Djenné-Djeno, and the Raetian Free State in Switzerland.
At a personal level, history can do much more than help us realise that there is hope for transformative change: it can also spur us to become one of the changemakers ourselves. Whether in our communities, or workplaces, or anywhere else where we may want to make a difference, we can look to the past as an array of possibilities. From joining a protest movement or setting up a cooperative enterprise to taking part in a citizens’ assembly, history reminds us that we are part of the great traditions of active citizenship that stretch back into the past. (p. 253)
I wish that I shared his ‘radical hope’. While I acknowledge that the past does give examples of alternatives, using them as templates is fraught with contradictions and impossibilities. They can only be shards of hope, and the fact that so many of his examples are drawn from societies than no longer exist is not encouraging. As he admits, no civilization lasts forever, and I’m very much aware that our epoch of industrialization, democracy, and post WW2 peace is just a fleeting smudge on the timeline of human existence. I’m reading this in early March 2025, when the world is becoming a darker place, and at the moment those forces of untrammeled power wielded by strongmen, tech bros and lobbyists seem too strong for ‘radical hope’.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
A personal aside: Krznaric grew up in Sydney and Hong Kong, and he’s a player of real tennis. My brother’s family is very involved in real tennis too. I wonder how the real tennis fraternity deal with this colonial’s radical views?
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 